I’ve been off-message, off-brand, off me box this past long while, head down in the slog of it, and not a word posted to show for it. That ends here.

A short word on where the time went, and then the good part. The house and garden have eaten more of these last six months than I care to admit, scrubbed, mended and made presentable for sale, because the travelling years do not begin until someone else holds the keys to this place. It is dull work and I will not dwell on it. It is nearly done.

What I will dwell on is the van. Morrison is, as I write, stripped back to the bare shell, every system out, the metalwork laid open and honest before me, mid-way through a restoration thorough enough to earn the next quarter-century. There is a great deal to tell, the turbo, the steering, the great interior strip-down and all that has followed, and I mean to tell it properly in catch-up entries as the time comes. It has not been silence for want of doing. Quite the opposite.

But a van under restoration is a van going nowhere, and a blog needs the open road as much as the workshop. So before the catch-ups begin, something different.

The next four entries that follow this one are not about Morrison at all. They are from a long weekend Ochi and I took at the start of June, driving the old SL280 across to Germany for the Abenteuer & Allrad show at Bad Kissingen, four days of it set down as they happened: the drive out, the show ground and everything on it we coveted or carried home, and two slower days in a Bavarian spa town that has quietly become a place we return to. The show is where a good deal of the habitation plan took shape, the toilet, the mattress, the forty-eight-volt question, the recirculating shower, so it feeds directly back into the build even if there is not a spanner in sight.

I will post them separately over the coming days. Read them as a breather between the heavy lifting, and as a reminder of what all the heavy lifting is actually for.

The tools are still out. The work goes on. Watch this space, properly this time.